Dearest Anonymous Would-to-Be Assassin, and General Reading Public as Well,

When one draws attention, that attention must, by its very nature, be mixed of both the positive and the negative feelings. If one were to draw but one attendant, then that attendant might, for example, like, love and approve of you in 95% of its feelings and dealings, and despise, revile and wish-ill of you with the remaining 5%. Likewise, drawing some 100 admirers, 95 would, most assuredly and perpetually be filled with the good-will toward you, will five scurrilous, ill-kempt and hygienically suspect slumpmonkies would have the overgrowing disgust at the very mention of your moniker. It is simple mathematics.

Doubtless, it should be not a curiosity that an individual of my fame and fair-repute should attract a certain number of detractors, who would choose to defame and drag mudward my good name. Unfortunately, that certain number seems to have grown very large in very brief time.

"Face it, Lord A.," Rob did commiserate as he held the print-out of the aforementioned to-make-dead-threat pressed against the glass of my tank, "You tell it like it is, dude. You're 100% real. So, you know, you make close friends and close enemies— nuthin' in the middle. It's hard. You're totally hard. It just isn't your world, you know?"

Rob is a dear one, there is no doubt. I shook of my headsac, briefly lamenting in my trippleheart the jealous folly of this dry and searing surface world, and then Rob and I set to the brainstorming of who it was, now, which most wanted me killed.

Upon first viewing this missive, I took it initially to be a brief note— perhaps joking, perhaps of the legitimate— from my old arch-friendnemesis HerrDoktorRoper (for those curious as to how one's colors towards a friend dear or enemy dearer might be so changeable, let it simply be said that, in all truth, friends are a complicated business. It is not being friends, especially with one such as Clyde.) Setting Clyde aside— Rob having made the valid point that it was unlikely that in the same fortnight a single friend-conflicted would both come to the lab for the annual Yahtzee tournament and threaten of my life, especially drawing into consideration how very much money Clyde won that evening.

To saying nothing else, one must recognize that the man's adroit dicemenship is truly eerie. It is not for nothing that he was banned from Circus Circus, Stratosphere, New-York-New-York and the Dunes (pre-detonation.)

I jerked bodily in my tank, dropping into an involuntary defensive posture, my skin leaching to lightmurky insubstantiality and even, I shame to admit, squirting a smidgen of ink into my waters. "Rob," I whispered a-feared, "Could this not be a brandishment from the SPAM, which is coming to get me!?"

Rob found it unlikely, and was able to coax me forth from my rocking hiding-hole. I lunched briefly on a much calming set of corgis, and we carried on our thinking— and, perhaps it was the emotional rolling coaster, perhaps it was the neurotropic effects of the tiny, delicate dogs, perhaps a simple and Jungian moment of synchronicity— but the air and water veritably crystallized with the force and clarity of our co-realization:

Indeed! This threat-request could only have its origin with those who feel the threat of my near-assured incumbency, especially concerning the most recent polls, which demonstrate clearly to even the least sightful my coming ascendency as the squid-vote grows ever more powerful. The heat, she is on, as is the pressure. Although your Chinese Paper Placemat Zodiac may indicate 2004 to be the Year of the Monkey, it is, without doubts, the Year of the Squid.

Of course, from which candidate the threat did originate remained unseen. While upon the one tentacle, its charmingly childlike naivete seemed to tell the hand of King George the Bush, upon the other, its earnestness bespoke CryptoJohn Kerry. It was, surprisingly, Rob, who did wield the sword to split Gordie Howe's Knot in this matter:

"It's both of 'em, together. Skull and Bones, Lord A. Skull and Bones."

Of course! The clarity, she was indeed crystalline: who could benefit more by my demise than this Sinister Cabal, unifying the Left and Right Wings into a single flying harrier! That Skull! Her Bones! The Terrordactyl swooping devouringly from the sky, her boney beak slavering to pierce our tender mantles and dig out our optically perfect eyes!

Let it then be known that your question— CryptoJohn, King George— remains unanswered because it is unanswerable: I am a body in this world, true, but more upon that, I am a notion whose Time has come to be slipped upon the Earth's Surface! I am an Ascendent Whim, a Genius of the Age, the Zeitgeist made madwrithing and vengeful flesh! I might well quote of the Non-Prophets in their "Damage" in reflecting that I am neither Left Wing nor Right Wing, but rather the middle finger.

I stand to your challenges! The gloves made of children? They Are Off!

And let it be known, were any of the dogs in my kennel as displeasing to the eye as either of you, I would shave their hindquarters and teach them to reverse-walk before eating of them. I speak only the truth in noting that both of your mothers are so promiscuous that your paternal lineage is quite terribly muddled. Additionally, your mothers are so very unintelligent that standardized testing causes them marked difficulty; Barbara Bush is so lowly of the Intelligence Quotient that she must climb atop a stool to raise of her Quotient, and Mother Kerry is so laking in acumen that when the medical doctor told her she had ought to take a pregnancy test, she asked how long she would be allowed to study in advance. Furthermore, the former mother is so fat that when she sits around the house, she does indeed sit around the house, and the latter mather is of such extreme girth that when your Faceless God Upon the Waters said "fiat lux!" he executed such reality by simply shoving one of her bottom-cheeks from obscuring the great fiery ball of the sky.

Bring your hashish loving assassins, for though they slaver, they shall not succeed. Were I to fall, a rising tide of Squidkind would rise behind and over my corpse!

Rob here. Just FYI: I wrote the note. Keeping Lord Architeuthis on his toes— or whatever— tentacle tips? Something like that. Mixing it up, is all. Getting a little more bark into him for this election coming up. Ha!

Lil more FYI: I figure, if I were gonna off Lord A., I'd do it by pumping a few extra thousand pounds-per-square-inch of pressure into his tank. That'd pop out at least one of the exterior windows, and send Lord A., all his agua and most of his weird crap plumetting 74 stories. But, you know, whatever.